Palestine

A recent visit to Qatar by attorney Alan Dershowitz, Zionist Organization of America President Mort Klein and Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is part of a campaign by American Zionist leaders and their supporters to fortify Israel’s standing in the region in the most difficult period faced by the Arab and Muslim world. We can’t…

On January 15th, the Palestine Liberation Organization Central Council meeting in Ramallah concluded with a vote “to suspend recognition of Israel until it reciprocates by recognizing a Palestinian state and to cease security cooperation.” The meeting was called after Trump’s decision on Jerusalem, which was followed by the showdown in the U.N. Security Council and…

The position of the Turkish government on Jerusalem is very critical and has made an impact on the world stage with the U.N. vote. Certainly, the Turkish effort can be further strengthened by adopting a robust domestic and international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) strategy in affirmation of Palestinian civil society’s call for this specific…

The U.S. vetoed yet another U.N. Security Council to shield Israel from any consequences for the continued occupation and annexation of Jerusalem and wholesale violations of international law. Trump’s recent recognition and decision to transfer the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem is undertaken to force an acceptance of Israel’s vision of itself and the city, a…

Trump’s policy grenade, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the decision to transfer the U.S. embassy to the occupied city, should be added to America’s three decades or longer disaster called “Middle East peace process”. Observers of U.S.’s “Middle East” policy understand that it has been shaped by two prong interests:…

On the eve of the 100th anniversary of Balfour Declaration, Palestinians under occupation and in the diaspora are due an unequivocal apology from the British government. However, on October 29, 2017, the current Tory Government Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson struck in The Telegraph a celebratory note calling the Balfour Declaration an “incontestable moral goal: to…

Imperial Britain Gave Palestine to the Zionists When It Was Still Part of the Ottoman Empire. On Nov. 2, 2017, Palestinians mark the hundred-year anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, a letter from British foreign secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild that committed Britain to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine….

The combination of the 1492 Expulsion and Inquisition of Muslims and Jews may seem out of place at a first glance when the Balfour Declaration is discussed and added to the list. For sure, all these three are monumental events, but while in the case of the Expulsion and Inquisition the consequences were immediate and…

Teaching a summer course on Muslim Decolonial Thought in Granada, Spain brought me again into contact with the history and consequences of the Inquisition and the Muslim and Jewish expulsion in 1492 and afterward. More to the point, a visit to the Inquisition Museum in Granada and the Torture Museum in Cordoba raised a series…

As we commemorate the anniversary of WWI and the Balfour Declaration, it is important to reflect on Ottoman history and their relationship to Jerusalem. The Ottomans represented the last cohesive Islamic political system to exercise unfettered governance over Jerusalem, and it was during their collapse that Palestine became occupied first by the British and then…